Shen Hsin-ling—Charity Begins at Home

At five in the morning, Shen jumps out of her warm bed in a rush to catch the first express train at Dou­liu Station. Today she’s traveling to Shou­shan Senior High School in Tao­yuan to give a talk to the students.

Standing on the podium, she’s slightly unwell with a mild cough, but her friendly smile and witty manner are no less attractive. Talking about experiences from her own life, she encourages the students with ideas like, “You don’t need to wait till you grow up to help others!”

Warm applause marks the end of her speech. She’s treated much like a rock idol, surrounded by students asking for her autograph and having photos taken with her. Then she rushes to Hsin­chu where an Internet videoconference is scheduled. Lunch is a hasty snack at a highway rest stop.

Don’t you get exhausted? Should you be working at this pace when you’re unwell? The slim, tanned but determined figure brushes aside concerns with a dimpled smile: “It’s just a bit of a cold. I’ll be OK with a few pills.”

As an “idol” featured in school textbooks, Shen is well received wherever she goes. After her speeches, she is often surrounded by students asking for autographs and wanting photos taken with her. This picture was taken at Shoushan Senior High in Taoyuan.

Shen’s busy schedule wasn’t limited to only this day. The calendar in her laptop is packed with engagements—a full schedule. As an “idol” featured in school textbooks, she makes at least two speeches a day, and spends her evenings updating her charity websites.

Yes, Shen admits frankly that she sometimes gets exhausted, “But as long as I think my story might encourage or inspire others to follow their dreams, I have to keep going.”

Shen’s resolute character probably stems from her background.

Born in 1989, she was an only child. Before she arrived, her parents worked in their own small contract garment manufacturing business. In the mid-1980s, however, the NT dollar soared against the US currency, putting pressure on the export-oriented textile trade. Eventually, because of problems with suppliers, the Shen family business finally closed its doors with huge debts.

Shen remembers well that life was very hard during her childhood. To make a living, her parents took her with them selling balloons at a mobile stall in the night markets, as well as delivering pets for a pet shop. She often had to sleep in the back of the truck packed with caged dogs.

Because of their unsettled life, Shen missed out on kindergarten and learned her Chinese characters from old newspapers and second-hand books collected by her mother. This experience of hardship at such a young age depicted clearly for her the enormous gap between rich and poor, developing in her the trait of perseverance, and creating a young woman more mature than her years.

Despite the hardships, Shen has visited every corner of Taiwan to share her stories of philanthropy with students. The photo was taken at Xinhua Elementary School in Tainan.

By the time she started elementary school, her family had finally settled down in their Yun­lin hometown by renting an old sheet-metal-clad building to start a small grocery store. Living at pretty much the lowest level of society in a small country town, there seemed little hope for the future. But an unexpected event led her to realize that the key to one’s fate is in one’s own hands.

She was then 10 years old, and like her peers in the fourth grade of elementary school, was starting to learn about computers. Shen became deeply fascinated by the wide world of the Internet, and often stayed behind in the library or the computer room after school to learn by herself.

Shen’s mother noted her interest in, and talent for, computers. Ignoring their neighbor’s ridicule—“What do poor people need with computers?”—her mother pawned her jade ornaments to buy a second-hand computer for her young daughter. Shen was aware of the sacrifice her mother had made, and this spurred her on to study even harder.

Around this time, her grandfather was worried about the low prices he was getting for his pomeloes, a type of citrus fruit. Shen somehow remembered people selling products on the Internet, and she naively tried to duplicate how they did it. She searched out email addresses for some of Taiwan’s small and medium-sized businesses and sent off more than 100 mails. She wrote with the naive sincerity of an elementary-school student: “My grandfather’s pomeloes are very tasty, so you’re welcome to order some if you need any!”

Surprisingly, three days later, they actually received a number of orders. The whole family was over the moon. Her grandfather kept asking her: “Is it for real?” As a result of Shen’s marketing, that year’s crop of more than 18,000 kilos of pomeloes was sold out. “This was the beginning of my realization of the power of the Internet!”

With her growing Internet skills, the family’s fortunes improved dramatically. During fifth grade, income from the grocery store dropped sharply because a new supermarket opened opposite them. Shen suggested returning to the family’s original business in the rag trade, so she taught herself how to build a website to take orders for company or organization uniforms. Thus the family business entered a new phase of relative prosperity.

Although the Shens are still living in the old two-story house which contains both their home and business, their small factory has gained some status around central Taiwan. They process orders from a number of major companies including China Airlines, Carre­four, Green Furniture, and Yung-Ching Realty.

At only 22, Shen with her sweet youthful face has probably achieved more in charitable work than many people who are much better off.

Apart from using her knowledge to improve her own family’s livelihood, Shen’s compassion extends to other disadvantaged people.

This impulse to help others derives from an education gained from her parents: “In my childhood, even though we were very poor, if my parents saw that any of our neighbors needed help, they wouldn’t think twice!”

Aside from her parents’ influence, other motivations also drove her into charity work: to voice her opposition to the gap between rich and poor, and to deny others the right to look down on her just because she was poor.

In the sixth grade, her family couldn’t afford extra coaching. After listening enviously to her classmates’ chats about the possibilities of learning online, she developed the idea of setting up a free educational website for herself and other classmates who couldn’t afford cram schools.

Shen decided to set up her own site—to help educate disadvantaged students to make their lives better, and to persuade adults that she was capable of doing it. She began to put together a business designing company websites in order to raise money for her own. She spent time in libraries and bookstores, and borrowed textbooks and reference books from friends to help her design teaching materials; she spent time every day browsing websites to learn the techniques of animation and sound effects; and she made good use of her dedicated net friends, inviting a number of teachers to provide materials for free.

The An An Free Education Website was formally established in November 2002, and has developed a reputation as one of the best learning resources for remote areas and disadvantaged elementary or high school students. The website has accumulated more than 400,000 online lessons and 3000-plus educational films, along with over 4 million users from Taiwan, mainland China and Hong Kong.

Shen spends much of her leisure time capturing images of grassroots workers across Taiwan. She wants to give these hardworking people laboring in the sun some sort of voice.

In her speeches, Shen repeatedly stresses her belief that the word “impossible” actually means “I’m possible.” She challenges people’s belief that some things are impossible and employs this philosophy in her work. Apart from narrowing the educational resources gap between rich and poor and between city and country, Shen has also built a website that provides a wide range of resources for recent immigrants. The resources include Taiwanese dialect lessons, driver’s license practice exams, practical information for living in Taiwan, and legal advice.

The range of her concern for disadvantaged people extends to farmers and manual laborers.

As a lover of photography, Shen spends her leisure time capturing images of manual workers across Taiwan, with more than 260,000 photos taken over the years and later used to set up a website dedicated to profiling the grassroots workers of Taiwan.

The motivation to create a photographic record of working people was inspired by an incident that Shen describes thus: “Once I was out walking when I overheard a conversation between a mother and her child. The mother was scolding the child by pointing out the sweating laborers on construction site scaffolding: ‘You’ll end up like them if you don’t study.’ I felt so very sad when I heard the mother’s comments.”

Shen believes that farmers, fishermen and the broad range of grassroots workers are in fact the lifeblood of Taiwanese society. Her photographic record allows those hardworking people laboring in the sun a sort of voice—the website, which records the lives of Taiwan’s common people, has so far attracted more than 12 million visits, and has won awards for creativity and design in a special exhibition at the 2008 Bei­jing Olympics.

Many people wonder how a young woman is able to balance a heavy study load and such a range of philanthropic activities. Shen embraces her own philosophy of “95.” Let’s say that you are 95% satisfied with your schoolwork. You could use all your time and energy to get that 95 up to 100, a gain of only five. But if your starting point is zero, that same time and energy invested elsewhere could give you a level of 50 or 60, a huge gain. Since Shen started out at “zero” in charity work, she is willing to sacrifice the extra few points of academic rank for what she gains by doing what she loves.

Although her academic performance is not top-level, her many years of charity work have made her resumé all the more impressive. Also, she has comprehensive skills in computer technology, with 37 professional certifications in the IT field, and earnings of NT$4 million from company website design. All profits go towards her charity work.

After being recommended and admitted to the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at National Tsing Hua University (NTHU), Shen graduated one semester early during this year’s university winter break, and was offered admission to nine master’s programs at National Taiwan University (NTU), NTHU, National ­Chiao Tung University and National Cheng­chi University.

Family support is her mainstay. Her mother, Xu Li­juan, is her greatest ally, assisting when she has to stay up late preparing teaching materials, or goes out taking photos all over Taiwan. This is quite a unique situation: most university students are generally striving for independence from their parents.

Shen plans to study in NTU’s Graduate Institute of Journalism in September, hoping to become a freelance journalist and continue being a voice for the disadvantaged. She has been so busy that she has had no time for love, and she never has time for the sort of leisure activities enjoyed by most young people—but she has no regrets.

Journalists who have interviewed Shen often become fascinated with her story—how can such a young woman possess such energy and enthusiasm for the welfare of others? She is one of a new generation who are bold enough to challenge themselves. At her still tender age, Shen has accomplished much—more than most will achieve in a lifetime.